Every year at Wonderfest there’s a “challenge” build, where a theme is decided and everyone builds something based upon said theme. Several years back the challenge was to make something based upon Joe Johnston’s sketches. Being a B-Wing nerd, I picked his concept B-Wing drawings. They all varied in certain details, which is what concept drawings are for, so I picked what I liked from each sketch, and made my model based on that.
When I first started, the idea was to do this mostly by hand: carve wing, fuselage, and cockpit out of solid resin the like, then skin it in styrene and plant greeblies. As the build progressed, and I missed the initial deadline due to a bit of a respiratory infection and other things, 3D printer technology jumped in leaps and bounds, so that when I was ready to return to the build, I scrapped all of the work I’d done previously and went all-in on CAD design and printing.
I work in Rhinoceros, a software that I started playing with a long time ago, and that I’ve used daily at my day-jobs for over ten years now. For the main components, I dropped the sketches into the software and drew over them to get the basic shapes of the wings, cockpit, and engine housing. It was then a matter of making them all fit together, and then detailing. The main sticking point was the cockpit. On the screen-used B-Wing, the entire cockpit module rotates, but with the cockpit shapes in the sketches, that wasn’t going to work. I ended up tweaking the design so that the front, with the canopy framing, pilot seat, and instrument panels, are a separate module, which rotates within the rest of the cockpit housing. I was going to put a rod with ball bearings in there initially so that it could spin, but at this scale that was a bit much, so I instead attached the assembly with magnets, so that one can reposition it (something that I’ve maybe done twice).
The detail inside the cockpit didn’t exist in any of the sketches, so I made it up. I went with a “floating” design, with the pilot’s seat and instrument panels sticking out and hanging over nothingness, based upon the design of another favorite Star Wars ship, the U-Wing. For the pilot I took an F-1 driver head and stuck it on an X-Wing pilot body.
I added a sprinkling of 3D greeblies, a few I found online, a few I drew myself, placing them here and there after I’d finished the main structures and the panel lines. I printed everything in an “industrial strength” resin. The detail of the prints was great, but there were some layer lines on the large flat expanses, which required a bit of sanding to smooth everything out.
Once the major sub-assemblies were built, I hit everything with gray primer, then the panel lines and areas in shadow with black. Over that I shot flat white – the overall color – through splotchy masks. Normally that’s done with a dark paint, but I wanted to try it the other way around. Once the splotches dried, then the same color was thinly sprayed over it until the splotches nearly disappear. This visually breaks up a single color monotone surface. I kept the markings simple, as there really aren’t any called out in any of the sketches, but the B-Wing looked too plain without them. I kind of wish I had taken the blue of the stripes and canopy frames back from the cockpit, to give it a little more color and visual interest in that area. Weathering was kept to a minimum, to keep the clean sketch look; I did very minimal streaking, and highlighted all of the panel lines with extremely thin oil paints and a double-ought paint brush.
Brass telescoping rod from Albion make up the various cannons. I drew and laser-cut the display base, and mounted the model on a carbon fiber rod. The eagle-eyed will notice that I asked Bill George sign the base for me, as he built the screen-used B-Wings for “Return of the Jedi“.
This is one of my favorite projects. It was the first time I did a truly start-to-finish scratch-build project outside of my day job, and I’m extremely happy with the result. I took it to the Scale Model Challenge show in 2024 and received a bronze medal; it’s truly amazing to be recognized at what’s considered one of the premiere scale model shows in the world.
Paints:
-Mr Surfacer 1200 gray primer base
-Tamiya XF-2 White base. This was initially applied through a splotch-mask, then highly thinned white applied over that so just a bare grey splotch showed through.
-Blue markings: Tamiya XF-18 medium blue
-Gray “mechanicals”: Tamiya XF-54 dark sea grey, with a glaze of black gray (?) over that
-XF-19 Sky Grey added to white, very very little, for mist-over coat to break up starkness of white.
Model completed in June of 2023
